It
could be argued that Don Carlos is Verdi’s finest
opera. Some might contend that accolade as properly belonging
to any one of the middle period trio of Rigoletto, Il
Trovatore or La Traviata. Others might point
to Aida or his two final Shakespeare-based masterpieces Otello or Falstaff.
What is undeniable is that Don Carlos is Verdi’s
longest, noblest and most complex work. It is his grandest ‘Grand
Opera’ with a plot intermingling public and private scenes
and confrontations, the conflicts of parenthood and love,
and as if that were not enough, the power struggle between
church and state. It calls for no fewer than six principal
singers plus several comprimario roles. As it was to be
a Grand Opera for the Paris Opéra it also has a ballet
sequence.
After
the success of his middle period operas Verdi, now affluent,
retired to his estate with his wife. At the insistence
of Cavour, the first Prime Minister of a united Italy,
he represented his area in the first Italian National Parliament. After
that involvement he only accepted commissions if he was
highly motivated by a proposal or circumstances such as
that which took him to St. Petersburg for La Forza del
Destino in 1862. He was very much his own man. In 1864,
when spending time revising Macbeth, Emile Perrin,
director of the Paris Opéra approached him to write once
more for the theatre. With the Great Exhibition of 1867
on the horizon, and Meyerbeer dead, Perrin, realising he
would need a Grand Opera for the season that year, turned
to Verdi. With the helpful intercession of a mutual friend,
Verdi committed himself to write a work of four or five
acts, with ballet.
The
agreed subject for Verdi’s new Paris opera was Don Carlos.
He travelled to Paris in July 1866 and began composing.
Schiller’s poem is a long one and so was the libretto to
which Verdi composed the music. By February 1867, as rehearsals
for the first night were in full progress, it became obvious
that it was too long if the Parisian audience were to get
their last trains home. To meet a shorter performance time
Verdi reluctantly excised various sections. He made further
reductions during the run of performances. At the Verdi
Congress in Parma in 1969, David Rosen, an American scholar,
produced a previously unknown section of the Philip-Posa
duet that had been folded down in the conducting score
prior to the premiere. The English musicologist Andrew
Porter, in a detailed booklet essay with this issue, explains
how, acting on a hunch, he visited the Paris Opera library
and asked to see the score. He was amazed to discover that
the pages of the music that Verdi omitted from the premiere,
and subsequently thought to be lost, were simply stitched
together. These excisions amount to about thirty minutes
of music. More importantly, they give greater cohesion
and explanation of the details of the complex story as
the work unfolds. Porter copied out the missing parts.
Back in London, Julian Budden, the renowned Verdi scholar,
then Head of BBC Classical Music, planned a recording for
broadcast purposes and including the newly discovered parts.
It was the first public performance ever of the opera as
Verdi originally intended. It took place before a small
invited audience on 22 April 1972. For this unique premiere
Budden assembled a cast of mainly French-speaking singers
supported by stalwart British principals from the Covent
Garden and Sadler’s Wells companies. The seminal BBC broadcast
took place on 10 June 1973 after which the performance
disappeared from the public domain until its re-emergence
on this issue by Opera Rara. It is the first time that
the recording has been properly commercially available.
Although recorded second in the sequence of the five original
versions of Verdi operas mounted and broadcast by the BBC,
and three years after the first, Les Vêpres
Siciliennes, (see review) it
is the last in the sequence to be issued by Opera Rara.
The Peter Moores Foundation has supported the CD issue
of all five.
Don
Carlo first captivated me via LP highlights
of the 1954 recording; the four-act version, sung in
Italian. This featured the incomparable
Boris Christoff as the King and Tito Gobbi as the idealistic
Rodrigo. I knew nothing at that time of four or five
act versions, or that the opera had originally been composed
and performed in French and called Don Carlos as
distinct from the Italian Don Carlo. I learned
of the five-act version from the Solti (Decca 1965) and
Giulini (EMI 1970 - see review) recordings
of what is now referred to as the Modena version. Then
in 1973 came this significant BBC performance in French.
A
few years prior to that BBC broadcast some regular cheques
from a successful book enabled me to purchase a Tandberg
open reel stereo tape recorder. Using it together with
my Leak Stereo 70 and tuner I recorded the broadcast, strictly
for personal listening, of course. As I went back and to
between this recording and my Solti and Giulini Italian
language LP version I began the long journey of understanding
why Verdi always commissioned a French libretto before
making each of his various revisions to this work. The
metre of the French, its prosody, fits the music as the
marriage of a hand and glove. One product is that the essentially
lyric episodes of the work do not require such large operatic
voices as are found on the Italian language recordings.
That is not to imply that vocal heft is not needed from
time to time; likewise the capacity for legato singing.
In the later broadcasts of the original versions of Verdi’s
operas, particularly the fourth, Macbeth (see
review),
and the final one, La Forza del Destino (see review), the
BBC was able to hire singers who had sung their roles in
the world’s great opera houses. This was not the
case with the present performance made at a time when there
seemed to be a dearth of Francophone singers of the first
class. André Turp, who appeared at Covent Garden as Rodolfo,
sings Carlos. As he shows in the performance of the original
version of Simon Boccanegra in this series (see
review) he has a well supported lyric tenor voice and phrases
with
some elegance. That said, he lacks the ideal heft called
for by the role and sounds vocally strained at times. Edith
Tremblay as Elisabeth is seriously over-parted.
Joseph Rouleau is a better Grande Inquisiteur, in the 1989
video recording of the famous 1958 Covent Garden
production, than as Philippe where he sounds unduly nasal
and forced in his great act 4 soliloquy (CD 3 tr. 6). In
the confrontation that follows with the Inquisiteur, the
English bass Richard Van Allan sounds far too young for
the implacable octogenarian. Robert Savoie sings effectively
as Rodrigue but suffers badly from the sound balance at
the start of the prison scene where he is set too far back
on the sound-stage to the detriment of the drama and pathos
of the evolving scene (CD 4 trs. 1-4). This rear placing
of the voices in a very resonant acoustic is a characteristic
of the performance that I did not remember from the original
broadcast, and my recording of it. It takes a little getting
used to.
By
the time Claudio Abbado’s DG recording of Don Carlos in
French was issued, with the music missing from the premiere
included as an appendix, I had given up on open reel. That
performance, on four CDs, features a typical standard Italian-speaking
international cast of opera singers in the principal roles.
It does not have the French feel of this broadcast performance
despite the vocal superiority of the singers. Performances
in French were increasing slowly. The long-lived 1958 Visconti
production and sets were replaced at Covent Garden by a
production by Luc Bondy shared with the Paris Opera. This
was filmed live in Paris in 1995 and issued on CD (EMI)
and DVD (Warner). Although sung in French it excludes some
of the music Verdi discarded before the first night and
which is present on this Opera Rara issue. At the same
time it uses music from the 1872 Naples revision, particularly
the more dramatic form of the Philippe-Rodrigue duet in
act two. It is a well-performed and sung version that does
not suffer the acoustic drawbacks of the Abbado recording.
In 2004 the Vienna State Opera set out to be the first
to stage Don Carlos in its entirety as Verdi intended
before the excisions. The production was based on the Peter
Konwitschny’s controversial Hamburg staging
of 2001 and recorded by Orfeo (see review). Regrettably,
the production caused something of a rumpus among the audience
at the start of the auto da fe, enacted in the foyer
and which lacks sonic impact. Elsewhere extraneous stage
and audience noise is a drawback from time to time. The
difference in timing between De Billy in Vienna and Matheson’s
vividly drawn account here is worthy of scholarly study
with a full score, although as far as I am aware no Critical
Edition has been published by the Verdi Institute. In the
meantime the re-emergence of this seminal performance into
the public domain is to be wholeheartedly welcomed.
Robert J Farr
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Philippe
II (King of Spain), Joseph Rouleau (bass); Don Carlos
(Infante of Spain), André Turp (ten); Rodrigue
(Marquis de Posa), Robert Savoie (bar); Le Grande Inquisiteur,
Richard Van Allan (bass); Elisabeth de Valois (Philip's
Queen), Edith Tremblay (sop); Princesse Eboli (Elisabeth's
lady-in-waiting), Michelle Vilma (mezzo); Thiabault (Elisabeth's
page), Gillian Knight (sop); Le Comte de Lerme (A Royal
Herald), Emile Belcourt (ten); An Old Monk, Robert Lloyd
(bass); A Voice from Heaven, Prudence Lloyd (sop) 
